It could also be the reverse (see authoritarian countries), with international players leaving the market and local ones filling the space.
I just don't see that happening here. So maybe the UK becomes a no-travel zone for anyone in the worldwide tech industry? That would be sad, but it's a plausible outcome.
The UK's law is obviously a bit different as international companies can comply with them, but it would essentially just limit legal websites to big tech who have enough market reach that all that compliance could pay for itself.
We would have real privacy protection, and presumably in the very long term we'd see the benefits of that (more creative new ideas coming out of the EU, wealthy people preferring to live in the EU...).
Wealthy people care a lot more about taxes than vague notions of privacy protection.
Wealthy people are already willing to pay a premium for the sake of privacy. Look at Zuck buying his neighbours' houses.
It's worth noting that it's the US that would be isolated here, not the EU.
A very large number of other non-EU countries have implemented/are currently implementing extremely similar legislation to the GDPR, including Brazil, Israel, South Korea, Argentina, Canada, Japan, India, New Zealand, Indonesia, etc.
If the world eventually splits into "privacy-required" vs "privacy-optional" internets, the US will be one of few major countries in the latter camp. Yes, clearly the US-based internet is a large chunk, but long-term isolating the US internet entirely from most of the rest of the world will have a meaningful impact.
The EU has an list of countries whose current protections they officially recognize as already equivalent to the GDPR here: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/inte...
* https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/
* https://www.cnil.fr/en/use-google-analytics-and-data-transfe...
* https://www.gpdp.it/web/guest/home/docweb/-/docweb-display/d...
So far they've just been enforced against companies that use Google Analytics, but the reasoning behind it has been that having users connect to a US server enables that server to know EU users' IP addresses (which are legally PII), which would be subject to US government subpoenas to collect such, and the US government has not agreed to handle data in compliance with the GDPR, therefore it's illegal to have users connect to any US servers. It has nothing to do with "hoover[ing] and hoard[ing]" data.
The only way for an American website to comply would be to form a separate company not subject to US control at all. However, at that point it's not really an American website, since no data or control can go to the US.
Theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper, but I'm not aware of such a service at this time.
Because you "could" be logging visitor IP addresses? First, why would you have to log them? Is this a legal requirement in the US? You can't serve a page over HTTP unless you log a crapton of stuff for the government? And second...I don't believe it's illegal to log IP addresses under GDPR as log as the user consents to it...or is it?
And yeah, it's not illegal if a user consent to it, but the issue is that the user has to connect (with their IP address) to give you his consent or not. That's why I said theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper, but I'm not aware of such a service at this time.
Wait, what? Where do they say that?
> That's why I said theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper
Why would you do such a complicated thing?
Or those sites would have to comply with GDPR. Why is that not an option?
This horribly written law can easily be interpreted to apply to ISP's as well - so if the ISP is allowing these peer-to-peer systems that allow "unsafe" content to be shared, they're liable for it too, or they have to shut down the peer-to-peer systems.
Which again, is the point - to turn the internet into the easily regulable cable TV that they already understand.
Unless the UK significantly increases its military capacity and sets up world government, they will not be able to shut down the internet. The internet will still exist. The best they can hope for is a great firewall / North Korea type situation which would require a much more authoritarian (moreover functioning) government than even the UK can muster.
2) The great firewall was complicated by the design goal of accessing some, but not all, foreign websites. The UK could accomplish their goals in a day or two by just cutting all the underwater cables. That sounds like an impossible crazy thing, but so did Brexit a couple years ago.
A large amount (if not the vast majority) of fibre optics from Europe to Americas, go though the UK and cutting them off cuts off the biggest parts of the world from each other.
China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia... Aren't progressive by any metric.
There is no connection whatsoever between progressive social policies, and macroeconomic planning.
Denmark is an extremely progressive country, way more than China in all aspects, yet they run under a free-market capitalist economy.
I disagree that this is a partisan thing however. Whether it's Canada, the UK or anywhere else it seems each party in power just pushes for more surveillance and more censorship, just using different excuses to justify their actions.
For example, Harper's conservative government put forth bill C-13 (online crime excuse) and C-30 ('think of the children' excuse), which arguably laid the way for much of the spying apparatus that is currently in place against Canadian citizens. And while Obama allowed the NSA's warrantless internet surveillance program, Trump extended it until 2024.
All governments want to spy on you, and all governments want to be able to control what you say, period. They just want you to beg for it first.
(Side note: the American Republican party is big government conservatives. Their rhetoric is irrelevant - look at what they do, not at what they say they want to do.)
Is this common knowledge? It's the first claim I've encountered of Canada attempting Internet censorship.
Pre-Elon Twitter compared Canada's proposed regulations to North Korea and China.
>Newly released documents reveal Twitter Canada told government officials that a federal plan to create a new internet regulator with the power to block specific websites is comparable to drastic actions used in authoritarian countries like China, North Korea and Iran.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-twitter-com...
Are you sure you are not speaking of liberals, who believe government should be applied liberally?
Not like any of them act as they speak, but if I am not mistaken, that's what the words mean.
No, they believe "traditional" systems should be retained (i.e. conserved).
> government should be applied liberally?
That is almost diametrically opposite to the use of the word liberal as applied to politics.
Either way, many conservatives are collectivists: they believe the needs of society and preservation of tradition outweigh the desires of individuals, and so they tend to be in favor of concepts such as the traditional family excluding gay people, the rule of mothers in child rearing being more important than the freedom of women to pursue careers and so on.
The opposite of conservatives are progressives, people who believe the status quo is not generally good, and who seek to use the power of the state to change the status quo in a direction they believe is progress.
There are also many collectivist progressives, and as such tend to want things like egalitarian schooling even if certain extraordinary kids may be kept behind, or supporting progressive taxation such that those who have more have to give more to the collective.
On a different axis, we have liberals, who are the opposite of collectivists. Liberals can be conservative or progressive, but they ultimately believe that the most important value is individual freedom.
An example of a liberal conservative is someone like Ron Paul. He believes the status quo is generally good and shouldn't be changed to much, except where he thinks government has over reached. However, he also believes government shouldn't involve itself in people lives, even to preserve societal values, so he tends to support the legalization of Marijuana and perhaps even gay marriage (though given electoral realities, in not sure of his public position on the second). Contrast this to a more collectivist conservative like justice Clarence Thomas, who believes the state should ban gay marriage and even sodomy and contraception.
But behind this fundamental position, there still lies the position that the current state of affairs is fundamentally ok, or very close to it (or if not the current one, then some previous one that you aspire to return to). You can't truthfully be a conservative while believing everything is rotten and always has been - you would have no reasonable reason to oppose change, even change for change's sake.
I think most people agree that through history we've made a slow climb up a mountain. And it's always easier to fall down, than it is to continue climbing. One could look down into the abyss and say "we must be careful not to trip", or one could look up at the top of the mountain and say "we must get there at any cost". In this metaphor I'd say the revolutionary would be looking at another peak in the mountain range and say "we must descend into the abyss if we want to make it there".
(1) This is a good overview, but conservatives don't believe in the status quo for the status quo's sake. They believe that our traditions are highly optimized, essential components to living a fulfilling life. We don't even know why many of the rules even exist, the exact problem they solve has long been forgotten to history; so we should be careful when changing these rules.
There is an element of caring for your long-term health as well as the larger society, and raising the next generation of humans, which most everyone agrees with in some form (even libertarians argue that absolute individual liberty is what produces the best outcome for society). This not necessarily make you a collectivist, in the way that progressives push for labor unions, economic planning, and intersectionality.
What you're missing is a description of when conservatives support use of force to promote social values. Modern American conservatives think that rights come with responsibilities, that neither unfettered libertinism nor enforcement of responsibility with police power is legitimate.
(2) Clarence Thomas has never spoken from the bench about what laws the state ought to pass, he is careful to emphasize he is not a lawmaker and that is not his job. When he dissents in Obergefell and other cases that rely on "substantive" due process, it's because i legal rationale invented to uphold slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
He doesn't believe that the Supreme Court has power to prohibit them, so he's trying to do the next best thing: make sure that the Supreme Court doesn't prevent the federal or state governments from prohibiting them.
Also note that Roe v Wade has nothing whatsoever to do with the federal government. It has everything to do with individual rights, which don't come from the government, they are natural rights. The government can only recognize or fail to recognize them.
His predecessors recognized that these wildly popular natural rights exist and are compatible with the Constitution, so they made sure all states are compelled to recognize them.
The current highly partizan court has decided to ignore these natural rights in favor of their political agenda. That they couch this in the language of overreach is just an obvious rhetorical ploy.
If the federal government makes a law prohibiting abortion in any state, this same Supreme Court will argue that is obviously in the power of the federal government to regulate. If the federal government possess a law guaranteeing abortion, they will find that it is unconstitutional, tidying done other legal reasoning.
You may choose to fall for the rhetoric of demagogues like Thomas, but most people who think critically quickly see past it.
Longer version: this is a discussion of a bill in progress in the British parliamentary system, where the current government is by a party known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, or "Conservatives" for short. This should not be confused with any colloquial meaning of the term "conservative" that might be familiar to you from American vernacular usage.
Note that political party names undergo drift from whatever they originally described over a period of decades to centuries. For example, the Australian Liberal Party is anything but "liberal" in the US context -- they're roughly equivalent to the US Republican mainstream in terms of ideology. Nor is the Australian "Labour" party a party of organized labour. Neither is the British Labour party -- it used to be, but the party leadership embarked on a protracted and mostly successful campaign to cut it off from its grassroots over a decade ago.
Anyway: the Conservative and Unionist Party has a very specific policy platform, which is described by the word "conservative" in British political discourse and which does not map neatly onto the American concept of conservativism because large chunks of American conservative culture simply don't exist in the UK. Yes, there are out-of-the-closet libertarians and objectivists and Christian dominionists in the Conservative party, but they're minor factions. The main faction can loosely be described as post-Thatcherite free marketeers, with a recent influx of hard-right racists and xenophobes who migrated en masse from UKIP, the UK Independence Party, after the Brexit referendum in 2016. There is no equivalent of the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, so there can be no equivalent of Constitutional Originalism in British conservativism. It's a different animal.
I'm impressed with how many people really do not understand the meaning of these terms. The idea that the US is culturally divided makes a lot more sense to me now, reading all of these responses.
When multiple people tell you that you’re wrong and no one else is taking your side, the rational response is to consider that you may be wrong. But, as humans, we sometimes lack the willingness (or perhaps ability) to do so.
"eppur si muove"
It's a tad more nefarious. Say what you want about cable tv, but it doesn't track your every move.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-cable-company-know-what-I-am-...
So far Tor has implemented WebRTC[0], but that's just for bridging to their main network.
[0] https://snowflake.torproject.org/
P.S. I've also considered the "decentralized p2p social media" idea myself, but mostly because I believe the ideas we have currently behind online voting, ranking and moderation are completely at odds with IRL discussions which are P2P and based on "forwarding" ideas to known peers (friends, family, community members, countrymen) rather than posting and ranking content with anonymous peers (which are susceptible to Sybil attacks). The fact that so much discussion takes place on corporate-owned forums (Including this one, regardless of how benevolent ycombinator may be) presents a major threat to democracy in general.
Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against popular users.
If you could port IPFS to run completely in a browser you would have this complete "pseudo-social-media" functionality. They have something called "IPNS" where instead of giving someone the hash of a file like in BitTorrent's DHT, you could give them a public key which you use to sign the latest version of a file that is to be fetched. The Public/Private keypair could represent a user's identity, and the file in this case could be a blog or account page which is updated with new links to the user's posts, or links to other user's posts.
So if you ported IPFS to work within a web browser, it would just be a matter of implementing a user-interface. Boom, social media solved. You could maintain parity between desktop and web versions by using libraries like libdatachannel[1] and datachannel-wasm[2]
[1] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel [2] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/datachannel-wasm
I built a small proof of concept along these lines a while back. The implementation was similar to what you're describing with peers seeding and forwarding messages. I didn't get as far as name resolution since that's a tough nut to crack in p2p but building off of IPNS would probably be the way to go. The prototype worked but it wasn't very attractive to use since it was only good for passing notes and there are better services out there with more features. I think something like it would only be worthwhile building if there really was a concerted effort to lock down all social media in a fairly heavy handed way.
Where is the law vague? Your ISP is not a platform. I feel like this is a scare tactic.
China has done it already and it's very effective:
* Force every service provider to register their IPs and domains (for CDN use)
* Force every ISP to do stateful firewalling and block every attempt to establish a new connection unless the destination IP is on a whilelist maintained by the government.
Problem solved.
Yeah, they can't 100% win. They don't need to. In fact, even if they did 100% win, they'd still find reasons to need to crush some people just to keep people reminded of who has the guns.
Otherwise one can run p2p over VPNs, like for many other things.
This is their attitude.
They will legislate to achieve the outcome they want. If that means making it criminal to use encryption without backdoors, they will do that. If it means making it criminal to use P2P technology, they will do that.
They have and will use control over mainstream infrastructure (Internet traffic, software distribution channels, etc.). Use of non-mainstream infrastructure will be made increasingly difficult and used as an indicator of guilt.
The more sophisticated the technical workarounds required, the fewer people will be capable of using those workarounds, and even fewer people will be capable of building those workarounds. Fewer people are easier to control.
TrueCrypt, Lavabit, etc.
This too will remain constant.
The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/
No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too.
It's not idiotic, it's authoritarian.
And yet it will still be possible to ponder pink elephants.
don't think this is a bridge too far, covering your face in the presence of public CCTV got you fined/arrested the week before covering your face with feel-good masks was compulsory
don't @ me telling me it's stupid, I know it is, but this govt doesn't believe in free and private communications and it's working hard in progressively eradicating what's already out there, with full support from the main opposition party
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209044791...
it would much more practicable to resort to alternative channels outside the internet, like mesh networking using direct comms (typically ad-hoc wifi modes and other radio protocols to avoid the liability/detectability of cabling), sneakernet, IP over Avian Carriers - those are all cumbersome and rather slow typically, but still orders of magnitude better than trying to pass stuff over ISPs using steganography
Why is obeying idiotic unenforceable laws any different to this when it comes to technology, aside from the obvious of the stakes being much lower? Although the way the world is going, that may not be a given in the future.
I'd argue it may even be worse when it comes to cases of governments who are nominally democracies making idiotic laws for their populaces, because at least theoretically, those populaces could have voted in such a way that said idiotic laws would never come to be, and thus their misery, the stupid laws that they're subject to, etc, are somewhat self inflicted, and for those that do dissent it makes even more sense to feel zero obligation to the greater populace given that. I personally don't really buy this because in my experience, what people want in a democracy has very little with what they end up getting, and the same people that will scream blue murder about the right to self rule when it comes to a national group, will scream just as loud when it comes to an individual in the exact opposite direction.
No, the only strategy is to create realities just like the internet did with its inception, just like encryption was established. We would never have it if we tried to legislate it into reality.
Additionally legislation is completely ignored by state actors that put the population under surveillance. The battle for legislation was lost.
Consider how hard it is in the United States to lay new fiber (and this is an imperfect metaphor). The ideal solution would be to get legislative branches to solve the telcos oligopoly problem. That has not and is not working. So what's happening? Wireless internet over LTE, and 5G being deployed everywhere. Route around.
You mean like what the Pirate Parties, FSF, EFF, Mozilla, and countless others are trying to and failing? I never thought I'd see "well we have no political power to change things, but as disastrous as these laws are, for us specifically, maybe we can evade them for a little while longer if we're clever" described as "privileged".
No; some tiny minority of UK users may do that, but the overwhelming majority will just use whatever services are "approved" (follow whatever rules they have to, to stay in the market) and remain available by default.
I see no reason UK users couldn’t do the same. All it takes to get grandma on a VPN is for an enterprising grandson to set her up.
For what it's worth, in my experience when I was in China it was trivial to bypass the firewall using a VPN service.
But... if the need's there, people figure it out (as he's doing right now - for him it's something gaming related).
I wonder if I can put an IP block on my own site and just ignore it all too. Dumbass country.
Simple, because if that because popular, new laws will be drafted to ban all of that from all app stores for circumventing this or some other reason.
Everything is already in place for this, both hardware- and software-wise.
And all of them are completely irrelevant because only us nerds would even know about them let alone how to use them.
> People didn't buy their copy of Napster from GameStop back in the day
Those days are long dead.
The right bash script can set that up with a UI on all 3 major OSs. iDevices work with Wireguard
The “open web” would suffer but so would the panopticon which is more valuable to the masses long term
A new counter culture is needed. The old one went corpo rent seeking, as hippies do when they age.
Napster took off because it meant not spending 10 or 15 pounds or dollars or euros on a CD. THhe DRM came later, and what really killed DRM was the change in business model to iTunes with individual songs, the transformation of the 'star' from a face on a CD to a bigger product.
Yes there were risks, but zero oversight is how we built the internet byte by byte.
Anyone know if that “two computers talking directly to each other” patent has expired yet? Hard for companies to make those apps while patent-encumbered
The truth is that we already are all violating laws, every day we live, mostly without being aware of them. That is exactly why there are so many of them. The only thing more draconian laws do is make people decide actively that they commit them.
TL;DR for the article: 1. Any technical solution will be imperfect and can potentially lead to hundreds if not thousands of cases being raised 2. Difficulties in clearing your name in the case of false flags (not to mention how this would actually be implemented) 3. No clear guidance on how such a system would work 4. A death to encryption services since any system that would entail some for of media transfer would be in scope 5. A grey/dark market place for custom software that will still allow encrypted communications run on VPSes/servers that might restrict UK access but could be accessible through VPNs that exit outside of the UK and thus wouldn't fall under the legislation (I think, feel free to correct me on any of these points ofc). 6. A host of other issues from overworked law enforcement trying to deal with the flood to the migration of individuals involved in any illegal activities far far deeper and thus more difficult to detect.
This is a clear as day example of what happens when people with no understanding of these topics (and many others, I'm sure economy, education and law enforcement is managed by people with no real world experience in said fields...) are allowed to legislate.